David Horovitz | Trump Vows Support For Israel, Conquers AIPAC

When Donald Trump made his entrance to the packed Verizon Center on Monday night, the applause from the 18,000 AIPAC conference participants was polite, even warm, but certainly not overwhelming. There was a half roar from the higher reaches of the stadium, and a few isolated cheers.

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Was the indomitable Republican front-runner perhaps a little nervous about addressing what CNN had described as arguably his most challenging audience?

As it quickly turned out, not a bit.

Trump delivered a river of emphatically pro-Israel sound bites to a crowd that applauded with increasing enthusiasm as he progressed. Soon he was having to pause for brief standing ovations.

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Clearly, Donald Trump is a highly effective speaker. The revelation was that this audience, whom AIPAC had worried might protest the candidate too rudely, was so efficiently, almost effortlessly won over.

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Trump was pushing all the right buttons, offering unstinting praise for Israel to a pro-Israel constituency starved of uncritical support for a lot longer than two terms of government. And the response, in parts of the stadium at least, gradually moved toward adulatory.

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By the time he staged his most audacious gambit, his most divisive gambit, much of the crowd was in the palm of his outstretched hand. “With President Obama in his final year, YAY,” he began. And then he paused for the roar of approval he knew would come. And come it did — to the doubtless extreme discomfort of the AIPAC leadership. Trump stood and waited and smiled and shook his head a little. And then he followed up with, “He may be the worst thing that ever happened to Israel, believe me, believe me.” And the applause welled up again. (Read More)